Ideally, designers should always consider the user’s perspective when developing a product. When you work on design projects every day, though, you can lose sight of your real goal: creating an experience that people will find intuitive and useful.
Follow these tips to design from a user’s perspective and avoid trendy gimmicks that interest your design colleagues.
Design Interactions That Fit Your Target Audience’s Expectations
Interactions help people and products communicate with each other. When a user pushes a button, the app knows to perform an action. When the app presents an error message, users know to double-check what they entered.
Interactions can work in nearly infinite ways. When you design the interaction, you should keep the target audience’s expectations in mind.
In some cases, it makes sense to create a fun interaction. When the user makes an error, an icon smacks its head and says, “try again!” Many people will find this lighthearted approach entertaining.
The same interaction wouldn’t work in an app designed for professionals. Imagine getting that response from a business analytics app. Most people would uninstall the app and choose an option that took their work more seriously. Someone looking for a fun app probably wouldn’t like an interaction that simply says “error.” A serious user, however, might appreciate the straightforward information.
Keep Your Designs as Clean and Simple as Possible
When you spend your days thinking about interesting ways to design products, you can come up with some wacky ideas. You might want to share those ideas with other designers, but you shouldn’t include them in products that get released to the public. Instead, you should keep your designs as clean and simple as possible.
Clean, simple designs make products more intuitive. New users don’t have to read instructions. They know how to use the interface just by looking at the design and drawing from their previous experiences.
Creating a design system at the beginning of your project will help keep everyone on your team focused. With a design system, you limit the number of things that designers can add to the product. Instead of introducing a strange concept, they have to draw from the design system’s approved:
- Patterns inventory
- Colors inventory
- Typography
- List of icons
- Space inventory
With a design system, you get your team members to focus on creating a product that appeals to beginner and advanced users.
Share Prototypes to Get Feedback Before Releasing Your Product
Once you have a functional prototype, send it to people not working on the project to collect feedback. When you spend weeks or months designing a product, you can get stuck inside your own head. Something that looks perfectly natural to you may seem odd or off-putting to a new user.
Deliver the prototype to several people you trust to give you accurate feedback.
Your feelings may get hurt by some of the responses. After all, you have spent hours designing the product. You’re attached to it. You have to set those feelings aside to recognize the importance of outside, fresh perspectives. Try not to take the feedback personally.
You don’t have to follow every recommendation that you get, but you should consider their merit before you release the product.
Update Designs Based on How People Use Features
Your job doesn’t end when your product goes to market. Over the next few months, someone from your team will need to track users to see how they use your product’s features. The data can provide an essential view into what does and doesn’t work.
If the data shows that people rarely use a feature, you might remove it from the next update. Getting rid of an unpopular feature will only make your product more streamlined and appealing.
You may also discover that users spend more time than you expected looking for specific features. If data creates a heatmap that shows people don’t know where to find a popular feature, then you should consider making that feature more prevalent in the design.
Some key performance indicators to track after you release a product include:
- Session intervals
- Retention (how long people keep using your product)
- Churn (how many people adopt and delete your product over the months)
- Events (when users launch specific features)
You should also make a habit of reading customer reviews posted on the websites that distribute your product. You can learn a lot about needed improvements by paying attention to what unhappy users say.
Conclusion
If you’re a designer, you already know the importance of thinking from the user’s perspective. At times, though, you can get trapped by your own skills and expertise. When that happens, you may start caring about how creative your product is instead of how easy the product is for new users to adopt.
As long as you follow these tips, you should find that you stay on the right path.
